IncGamers has a confirmation of indications that StarCraft II players will not be able to play against gamers in other regions, when the RTS sequel is released this summer. "It'll be structured very similarly to World of Warcraft, where you've got the European region and players matched against the other players within their region," Blizzard's Frank Pearce told them. Pearce did explain it should be possible to work around this: "if you're a European player and you've got friends that are in another region that you want to be able to connect with, we definitely want to support that," although "it might mean that you have to access it through the US client." There's also an article on this on GXBlog, where Mark Yu suggests that two versions of the game may be required to play between North America and Asia: "Yes, when it releases on day one, if you want to connect with your friends in the US, get the US box or if you want to play with Koreans, then get the Korean box. However if you want to get the best experience out of your game here in South East Asia, you should get the local boxset. The latency, the community, those are the things are going to really define the experience, and you don't want to miss out on that."

HellSlayer wrote on May 28, 2010, 04:07:You are on a gaming site because you like games.

Well at least that confirms that you do understand this is a gaming site, your posting history suggests otherwise.

Anyway, you may note your post contains the subject line from a different thread... we have tried to contact you via email a couple of times in the past to see if we could clear up this bug (which only impacts a couple of accounts, seemingly yours in particular). We even changed your password to include a request you reply to these contacts. Could you please drop me an email to help us try and track this down? Thanks.

HellSlayer wrote on May 28, 2010, 04:07:lol Greed...name a country or a person that is not running on some sort of self-interest. You are on a gaming site because you like games. Is that a form of greed? Greed can be seen when we call someone rich greedy; greed wants what they have.

Yes, self-interest/greed whatever you want to call it, who claimed they had no self-interest? Obviously we all do. However the fact every person has some degree of self-interest really doesn't lead to, and really would seem to PREVENT people from just laying down and taking whatever nonsense any random multi-billion dollar corporation does on any given day, without even speaking about it.

Congratulations, you linked a Milton Friedman video, what's next, Gordon Gecko? Lol. By your own reasoning, we all SHOULD be complaining about Blizzard's policies, for our own self-interests.

lol Greed...name a country or a person that is not running on some sort of self-interest. You are on a gaming site because you like games. Is that a form of greed? Greed can be seen when we call someone rich greedy; greed wants what they have.

Zyr wrote on May 27, 2010, 18:08:Blizzard has already confirmed that the additional campaigns will be charged at expansion price, not the full price that Wings of Liberty is being charged for. Since..y'know, they're *expansions* this is kinda obvious. Did you complain about Blizzard being greedy for releasing Brood War for $29.99 back in the day, too? After all, they charged you more and made you wait to get the COMPLETE game!

No, they haven't actually announced a price yet, but early interviews indicated they would be full price(maybe they have backed off a bit due to negative feed back, who knows):

Objectively, one would think you would find SC1, with 3 playable race campaigns(of admittedly shorter length), to be more complete out of the box, than SC2, with 1 race campaign, followed by 2 expansions of unknown price, at least 2-3 years later.

Wings of Liberty, for that matter, is also easily found at ~$40-$50 pre-order if you know where to look. Like mine, which I snagged for $45. No, Amazon.com and Gamestop are not the only places to order games from. This price will likely be more widely available once it's released digitally as well, since retailers love to undercut.

Really? Where would that be, exactly? URL to back up your baseless claim would be appropriate. If you pre-ordered 1 year ago, congratulations, some of us were waiting to read about DRM and other nonsense tied to this game first.

The reason for the region division is A.) lag (no, 200ms is not very fun to play) and B.) integration with the World of Warcraft servers, which are already like this, for cross-game communication.

200ms is playable, and comparable, at least on my ISP, to playing people in California, who will be in the same realm as me if I actually bought the game. Aside from that, is there REALLY a reason to integrate anything in Starcraft 2 with WoW? Tons of other apps already allow communication during any program use. Even if this was the case, there is no evidence at the moment that realm competition, or lack thereof, would necessarily prevent realm-realm communication.

And yes, let's throw in accusations of most of us being pirates after multiple people have proven you wrong.

It's called a joke, I don't even care whether you pirate this or buy it, but please be offended.

And, by the way? Most mods/maps are going to be free. They'll be allowing a micro-transaction marketplace as an option due to the power of the map editor and as a way to reward modders for supporting their game. It'll be a completely optional thing, kind of like NWN's premium modules worked.

You are just talking out of your ass here, and I haven't seen any percentages for Blizzard/The actual map creator listed yet either. Hopefully you are close to being right though. I admit to being a pessimist here, but it sounds more like Blizzard/Activision wants to cash in a little on the insane success of mod maps like DoTA.

nutshell42 wrote on May 27, 2010, 18:07:I still can't believe how many of you claim to have a LAN with no access to the internet. Alright, fine, there have been some people pointing out that serious competition LAN parties with hundreds of users may not have the bandwith, but other than that? Seriously, if all you did was have 2-4 person LAN games you shouldn't be affected at all. Your LAN is on the internet. You can still play each other in private Battle.net games. You'll notice no differences...

What about 8? I regularly had 7 friends here for Starcraft 1. I'm on DSL so while I've got 6Mbit downstream, I only have 512Kb upstream and using more than half of that completely chokes the downstream. I know that current games don't need much network traffic (I think, never felt the need to actually check it) but you can't tell me that 8 people sharing 32 KB/s won't hurt the ping.

And all this just because Blizzard's to let us log in and then use the LAN for the actual game traffic.

What exactly are you complaining about? B.net will just act as the matchmaker/lobby service. If you are on LAN you will use LAN for the game traffic, you will just have to connect to B.net first. Your game play will be fine, B.net won't be 'hosting' your LAN game. If you are playing online then yes you will all be sharing that upload... but how exactly else would that work?

Also back in the day we used to get 7+ people online sharing a 6 (I think... might have been 8 or 10, but I doubt it as long ago as it was) Comcast cable connection and playing Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat on LAN. Worked just fine as long as we kept it under 10ish. More than that and yes we did have to go to LAN, but also there we were totally playing on a remote server.

Having two versions of the game is going to annoy me. Latency BS is BS. I have one of the shitter ISP's in Canada and I get 80-100ms to the US West coast, 100-110ms to Europe and 150-180ms to Korea and Japan. That's less latency then when I play WoW and I connect to their datacenters in Dallas, usually in the 250-300ms range.

Meh playing *insert game here* is one of the few ways I keep company with friends I've made, and people I know who are scattered all over the place. Email gets annoying but some nice network play beating each other up over stupid mistakes is much more fun. Guess I'll see what happens but NOT liking this.

--"For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong." --H.L. Mencken

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on May 27, 2010, 13:49:Apparently you are correct, Blizzard have always had higher(than other pc games) prices, at least as suggested retail. However I don't really see many people arguing the actual game is SHORTER, just that in order to get the 'complete' game you are going to end up spending somewhere around $180, and it will be at least 2-3 years later before you have the entire thing, according to Blizzard.

Also there really doesn't seem to be any debate over 29.99 or whatever the expansions were for SC1 and War3 vs 59.99 for each SC2 expansion, potential single player campaign game length aside. The multiplayer is the same client you get with the first game.

This site cracks me up, I wonder if any of the people arguing with me are actually going to even buy SC2 in the first place. I'm sure most of you will PLAY it, but...

Your ignorance is astounding.

Blizzard has already confirmed that the additional campaigns will be charged at expansion price, not the full price that Wings of Liberty is being charged for. Since..y'know, they're *expansions* this is kinda obvious. Did you complain about Blizzard being greedy for releasing Brood War for $29.99 back in the day, too? After all, they charged you more and made you wait to get the COMPLETE game!

Wings of Liberty, for that matter, is also easily found at ~$40-$50 pre-order if you know where to look. Like mine, which I snagged for $45. No, Amazon.com and Gamestop are not the only places to order games from. This price will likely be more widely available once it's released digitally as well, since retailers love to undercut.

The reason for the region division is A.) lag (no, 200ms is not very fun to play) and B.) integration with the World of Warcraft servers, which are already like this, for cross-game communication.

And yes, let's throw in accusations of most of us being pirates after multiple people have proven you wrong.

And, by the way? Most mods/maps are going to be free. They'll be allowing a micro-transaction marketplace as an option due to the power of the map editor and as a way to reward modders for supporting their game. It'll be a completely optional thing, kind of like NWN's premium modules worked.

Seriously, just stop. I wish there was LAN too, but you're grossly uninformed on the rest.

I still can't believe how many of you claim to have a LAN with no access to the internet. Alright, fine, there have been some people pointing out that serious competition LAN parties with hundreds of users may not have the bandwith, but other than that? Seriously, if all you did was have 2-4 person LAN games you shouldn't be affected at all. Your LAN is on the internet. You can still play each other in private Battle.net games. You'll notice no differences...

What about 8? I regularly had 7 friends here for Starcraft 1. I'm on DSL so while I've got 6Mbit downstream, I only have 512Kb upstream and using more than half of that completely chokes the downstream. I know that current games don't need much network traffic (I think, never felt the need to actually check it) but you can't tell me that 8 people sharing 32 KB/s won't hurt the ping.

And all this just because Blizzard's to let us log in and then use the LAN for the actual game traffic.

Beamer wrote on May 27, 2010, 17:26:I still can't believe how many of you claim to have a LAN with no access to the internet. Alright, fine, there have been some people pointing out that serious competition LAN parties with hundreds of users may not have the bandwith, but other than that? Seriously, if all you did was have 2-4 person LAN games you shouldn't be affected at all. Your LAN is on the internet. You can still play each other in private Battle.net games. You'll notice no differences...

This game's lack of nullmodem-support makes this a no-buy. Screw you Blizzard!

I still can't believe how many of you claim to have a LAN with no access to the internet. Alright, fine, there have been some people pointing out that serious competition LAN parties with hundreds of users may not have the bandwith, but other than that? Seriously, if all you did was have 2-4 person LAN games you shouldn't be affected at all. Your LAN is on the internet. You can still play each other in private Battle.net games. You'll notice no differences...

nin wrote on May 27, 2010, 11:35:While I'm not defending the decision at all, I suspect this has more to do with getting it working with battle.net, which they want divided into zones.

A reasonable objective, but surely it would be straightforward to apply a default zone setting that the player could manually change if they desired?

No doubt there's some questions during the battle.net install so "where are you" could be one of them (or simply fire off a ping). This also avoids having to duplicate inventories due to having multiple SKU's, though that may be moot if they need localisation to fit all the languages on there or whatever.

I have difficulty imagining why this isn't a simple issue to deal with, though it is easy to be cynical and assume it's a method of enforcing geographical price discrimination.

Well no, they're just letting map authors charge for their work and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either. Yes they will charge a premium for providing the service but that's not unreasonable. I'm just worried about whether or not we'll have a mechanism to evaluate maps beforehand. Map authors can still release maps for free if they want as well, I don't really see the harm in the UMS system.

Verno wrote on May 27, 2010, 14:45:I'm more into the custom map and singleplayer stuff myself. SC2's multiplayer is too competitive by nature, it makes it difficult to play amongst friends. But yeah I have no problem handing over $60 to get a top notch SP campaign and the eons of free maps. I'm a bit worried about the whole paid map thing but hopefully they have some form of demo functionality for UMS maps or the map authors figure out a solution themselves. No way I'm paying for maps sight unseen.

Ahh yes, Blizzard's new plan of charging for "premium" USER made maps, just when my rage was starting to subside... Their nickel and diming knows no bounds.

I could almost understand them charging for maps Blizzard actually makes, but charging for the next DoTA(SC2 version) or whatever, made by a random private citizen? Permit me to Lol.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on May 27, 2010, 13:09:Is it just me or is the campaign portion of any RTS, aside from Homeworld, the always the worst part of the game?

Campaign portion of RTS games is why I buy them. I'm too old for multiplayer these days unless it's with friends. Blizzard single-player campaigns are always top-notch. I have no issue with them taking my money.

I'm more into the custom map and singleplayer stuff myself. SC2's multiplayer is too competitive by nature, it makes it difficult to play amongst friends. But yeah I have no problem handing over $60 to get a top notch SP campaign and the eons of free maps. I'm a bit worried about the whole paid map thing but hopefully they have some form of demo functionality for UMS maps or the map authors figure out a solution themselves. No way I'm paying for maps sight unseen.